Pop Viz: Neko Atsume and Trying a New Thing

December 11, 2015

Obviously, I like blogging about Tableau. I’ve held multiple panels on it, written articles, basically professed my love for it at every public opportunity I could get. However, there’s a lot not to love about it. Like:

Having to build a website

Having to fight spam

Feeling pressured to keep it updated

Spending hours editing blog posts

Tinkering with my WordPress theme only to get frustrated eventually

Trying to get new readers when no one really reads personal blogs anymore

Sure, I’ve had some success posting blog posts to Reddit every once in while, but the way people use the internet is different now. People want all of their content coming to them through one source, aggregators like Reddit, social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter, or curated content platforms like Medium. Content creators don’t want to deal with the hassle of maintaining a blog. And having a dedicated blog is a big commitment if you only have a couple ideas of things you want to make and talk about.

I still get a healthy amount of blog traffic from the Tableau community. But a big goal of my Pop Viz work (and my work on Tableau Public, in general) is to improve data literacy among the general populous. When I’m doing a Pop Viz post on something like music or Pokemon or whatever, I want fans of that thing to consume the viz. But fans of those things are confused when they come to my Tableau blog and there’s all this other weird content about graphs and data and what have you. To reach them, it’d be better to have these vizzes as standalone projects. I could always just send them to the viz homepage, but then I can’t add all the context that I want to. So, what should I do?

I’m experimenting with a new platform to solve just this problem. I want to make beautiful, responsive, Medium-like articles with data visualizations. Medium doesn’t allow for Tableau Public, but I found a tool that does. It’s called Atavist. It has a drag-and-drop interface to add different “Blocks” of content. One of the blocks you can add is and Embed code, and Tableau Public vizzes work there.

I’ve tested out this platform by making a little article about an iPhone game that all the women in my family have been obsessed with called “Neko Atsume”. So here it is, my article “Data Atsume”. Check it out and let me know what you think about this format! I think I might use it for projects like this where I’m making a bunch of vizzes on a very particular dataset and I want people to explore it. If any of you out there have avoided starting a blog for your data projects because of any of the pain points I listed at the start of this post, I encourage you to try to make a data story with this tool. And be sure to tweet it to me @jeweloree!